Beauty’s brings Montreal-style wood oven baked bagels to Oakland

The sweet smell of honey and a rich aroma of baking dough waft from the warm kitchen, easily visible from an open, sunny dining area at the front of the shop. A wood-fueled fire burns steadily in the large metal oven at the back, cooking a row of bagels to a just-so shade of light brown.

Amy Remsen and Blake Joffe—she experienced in the restaurant business and he as a chef—opened Beauty’s Bagels in Oakland last August. For the past few months, the small Temescal shop on Telegraph Avenue has seen a steady flow of customers, with lines occasionally winding out the front door and spilling onto the sidewalk.

“There’s just something about a bagel,” said Joffe, laughing easily as he showed a young employee how to make bagels, making him only the second person in the shop to know the entire process. “It is such an easy food to eat, and it’s delicious.”

The couple moved from Philadelphia to Oakland in 2009, and fell in love with the Bay Area and its eclectic mix of food. The only thing lacking, Remsen said, was a good bagel. “A bagel was something we both missed,” Remsen said.

Over the last four years she discovered that a lot of people, other transplants from the East Coast, also missed their bagels. So the pair, who had dreamed of owning something together, decided to open a local shop and “create a good bagel,” she said.

They don’t serve just any kind of bagel at Beauty’s—these are Montreal-style bagels, distinct from the more common New York-style.